Historicising Transmedia Storytelling

Early Twentieth-Century Transmedia Story Worlds

Matthew Freeman

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781315439501
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Literatur
• Categoría: Literaturkritik in Science-Fiction

Tracing the industrial emergence of transmedia storytelling—typically branded a product of the contemporary digital media landscape—this book provides a historicised intervention into understandings of how fictional stories flow across multiple media forms. Through studies of the storyworlds constructed for The Wizard of Oz, Tarzan, and Superman, the book reveals how new developments in advertising, licensing, and governmental policy across the twentieth century enabled historical systems of transmedia storytelling to emerge, thereby providing a valuable contribution to the growing field of transmedia studies as well as to understandings of media convergence, popular culture, and historical media industries.

Part I

Defining Transmedia History

1 Characterising Transmedia Storytelling

Character-building, World-building, Authorship

In the introduction I began to argue that when stripped to its essence transmedia storytelling can be understood according to three characteristics: character-building, world-building and authorship. This chapter will elaborate on how each of these three overarching characteristics – which are more or less true of all stories – make up transmedia storytelling by engaging with the wider body of scholarship on this subject, explaining how further specific principles of transmedia storytelling identified by Jenkins manifest in transmedia stories. Doing so will enable me to historicise these three characteristics in Chapters 3, 4 and 5, respectively, showing how the past’s industrial configurations worked to build transmedia story worlds.

So, to re-cite Jenkins’ earlier definition, transmedia storytelling is the telling of ‘stories that unfold across multiple platforms, with each medium making distinctive contributions to our understanding of the [story] world’ (2006: 334). This is not to be confused with cross-media, in which content (news, music, text, images, etc.) is published in multiple media forms.¹ One example of cross-media might include reading a newspaper article online rather than in print. Thus with cross-media, and unlike transmediality, content is simply relocated across other media with little concern for expanding that content, or its story, or its story world.

Much the same is also true of adaptation. Admittedly the process of adapting a story from one medium to another does involve some variation on sameness, not least of all because a story may well need to change in order to work within the medium it is presented in.² And yet adaptation – as in William Shakespeare’s play Romeo and Juliet from the sixteenth century being made into the 1996 film William Shakespeare’s Romeo + Juliet – is primarily about using the affordances of a different medium to tell a different version of the same story, but not to expand that story. Evans (2011: 27) asserts this distinction clearly: ‘Transmedia [storytelling] does not involve the telling of the same events on different platforms; [it] involves the telling of new events from the same storyworld.’ Or as Wolf (2012: 245–246) puts it: Whereas adaptation is ‘translation’ (‘when a story existing in one medium is adapted for … another medium, but without adding new material to a world’), transmedia storytelling as ‘growth’ (‘another medium is used to present new material of a world’). But beyond these straightforward distinctions, how else can transmedia storytelling be characterised?

Let’s use the point that transmedia storytelling is about expansion and extension as a starting point and go from there. This idea evokes the imagery of building, of adding something to something else. Conversely, while Jenkins’ highly influential notion of convergence – itself the most common framing for transmedia storytelling – speaks of a situation where media now circulates or where ‘media content flows fluidly’ (2006: 332), the word ‘convergence’ itself seems to denote multiple pre-existing elements of media content all coming together. However, this chapter argues that transmedia storytelling is not so much about multiple pre-existing textual forms ‘converging’ as it is about multiple textual forms being built in the first place – one component being added to another and another. Imagine a series of new extensions that are added onto the same building to make a larger house. A transmedia story is built up in a similar way, which can be equally characterised in terms of building outwards.

This admittedly subtle shift in thinking is quite important. It is also in line with more recent thinking on transmedia storytelling. For example, Fast and Örnebring argue that rather than limiting conceptions of transmedia storytelling to ‘planned, strategic aspects of creation’ (2015: 2), it is equally as important to ‘emphasise the many disjunctions and contradictions that almost inevitably follow when extending transmedia worlds across/between media’ (2015: 2). Here, the focus is on ‘the emergent (as opposed to planned) nature of the narrative aspects of transmediality’ (2015: 2). The rationale behind Fast and Örnebring’s thinking and this push to understanding transmedia storytelling in terms of the ‘accrued characteristics that are more ad hoc/contingent than planned’ (2015: 2) is based on the fact that many transmedia story worlds are created over many years, by many people. And approaching transmedia storytelling from this more emergent and contingent perspective will allow me in the later chapters to show the importance of certain industrial configurations of the early twentieth century on the ways in which stories began to be told across multiple media during that time.

At this stage, however, allow me now to elaborate on each of my three characteristics of transmedia storytelling in turn, engaging with the scholarly literature available on the topic to further reinforce this general significance of building as well as to show the various forms that this takes. I start with my first characteristic – character-building – which again can be defined most simply as the act of both constructing and developing a fictional character.

Character-building

Most simply, understanding transmedia storytelling according to a small number of general characteristics means starting with a guiding principle – in this case the working motto of Starlight Runner Entertainment, a company that brands itself as the world’s leading creator and producer of successful transmedia franchises. And for Starlight Runner Entertainment, with transmedia storytelling, ‘it all starts with story’ (‘What Is Transmedia’, 2010: online).

Let’s take this motto as a kind of mantra for characterising transmedia storytelling and begin with the basics. If transmedia storytelling all starts with story, then what exactly is a story? For Roberta Pearson and Máire Messenger Davies, who give a usefully succinct and minimal definition, a story ‘arises from the combination of characters, settings, and events’ (2014: 128). All three of these factors are key to telling stories, and in more complex ways each of these factors also work to hold transmedia story worlds together and point audiences across media. Fictional characters, to examine the first of this trio, can certainly hold transmedia story worlds together and point audiences from one medium to another. Reiterating Bertetti, for instance, character ‘forms itself among and through texts … never completely enclosed in a single text’ (2014: 16). Hence Bertetti argues that ‘it is necessary to add the concept of transmedia character to the notion of transmedia storytelling’ (2014: 3344). Says Bertetti: ‘This concept indicates a fictional hero whose adventures are told in different media platforms, each one giving more details on the life of that character’ (2014: 3344).

Here’s a good example of a fictional character whose adventures are told across different media: Captain Jack Sparrow from the Pirates of the Caribbean story world, embodied famously by actor Johnny Depp in the film series. In response to a brief from The Walt Disney Company, who faced something of a problem when trying to make their lucrative Pirates of the Caribbean story world attractive to a child audience which may not have even been allowed to see the PG-13-rated film series, Starlight Runner Entertainment suggested a series of chapter books for younger readers. The books featured younger versions of Jack Sparrow. ‘It was the same story world,’ Starlight Runner’s Jeff Gomez insisted, ‘just years earlier’ (2014: online). The Pirates of the Caribbean: Young Jack Sparrow Series therein functioned as ‘the perfect gateway for kids to enter the storyworld’ (Gomez, 2013: online).

In this case, the concept of character was central to the process of extending the Pirates of the Caribbean story world across media as an ongoing transmedia story. Specifically, this example exemplifies a key point about transmedia storytelling that I alluded to above – that transmedia storytelling must ultimately produce a series of media texts that function not as versions of the same fiction, as in adaptation, but rather as continuing extensions of the same story. As Geoffrey Long puts it, ‘transmedia stories build narrative references to each component (the TV show chapter, the film chapter, the video game chapter, etc.) to direct audiences through the system of the franchise’ (2007: 10). In other words, it was not simply the fact that Jack Sparrow reappeared in both the Pirates of the Caribbean films and the Pirates of the Caribbean: Young Jack Sparrow books that served to construct a transmedia story world; rather, it was the fact that the latter children’s books built upon the former films, with both the books and the films working together to build the character across both media.

It was character, then, that worked to build narrative references between the films and the books, connecting both media texts as components of a larger story world. But this begs a more fundamental question that needs addressing: What exactly is a fictional character? Understanding the basic components of what makes a fictional character a fictional character is important, for this will allow me to identify the industrial configurations and strategies of the past that have worked to build characters across multiple media. I do not have the space to engage in this narratological debate fully, so for the purposes of my argument I offer a simple definition: Fictional characters are imaginary beings built up of particular physical, psychological and environmental components. Pearson and Davies propose a number of key components that they argue work to construct a fictional character, including appearance, dialogue, interactions with secondary characters, psychology, and backstory (2014: 154–159). In other words, a character is built using all or at least some combination of these components. But if character is one way of holding a transmedia story world together, and specifically character-building as I have proposed, then what might underpin this process?

Indeed, what configurations underpin these character-building components across media more generally? Answering this question means turning to Marsha Kinder. In scholarly terms, the critical foundation of transmedia storytelling actually first appeared in Kinder’s 1991 study of children’s media, which she used to define an ‘ever-expanding supersystem of mass entertainment’ that was organised across the film, television and videogame industries (1991: 40). In using the term ‘transmedia intertextuality’ to explain how the media content produced by these industries moves across other media, Kinder acknowledges the importance of intertextuality on what would later be called transmedia storytelling. Intertextuality harks back to Roland Barthes and, most explicitly, Julia Kristeva, who argue that multiple media texts exist and operate in relation to others (1980). Barthes quite similarly argues that a media text is ‘a multidimensional space in which a variety of writings … blend and clash. The text is a tissue of quotations’ (1977: 48). In other words, intertextuality can be more than mere allusions or references; it can also expand those allusions and references. And in seeing intertextuality as itself an expansion of story across different texts, as Caselli and Lesnik-Oberstein (2004) also propose, intertextuality creates a scenario where the meaning of a story may be built in relation not only to the individual text and story in question but also in relation to a range of other texts and stories that may be invoked in the reading process.

By way of example, literary theorist Lubomír Doležel argues that multiple stories are both linked and expanded within a given intertextual story world specifically by character(s). For in intertextual theory, Doležel argues, characters can ‘extend the scope of the original storyworld by adding more existents to it, by turning secondary characters into the heroes of their own story, and by expanding the original story though prequels and sequels’ (2010: 207). Doležel (2010: 207) demonstrates how this process of character construction works by pointing to the example of Wide Sargasso Sea, a novel written by Jean Rhys in 1966. Wide Sargasso Sea is a prequel to Charlotte Brontë’s famous 1847 novel Jane Eyre. Rhys’ novel followed the life of Antoinette Cosway, the first wife of Mr. Rochester in the Brontë novel, who was indeed a secondary character in Jane Eyre that was turned into the hero of her own story. Like an assemblage of ‘extensions’ that become a core part of a larger proverbial ‘house’, Wide Sargasso Sea exemplifies how intertextuality can work to build a fictional character across additional texts or additional media forms – via sequels and prequels.

Most simply, sequels and prequels, both serialised formats – essentially tell stories that, as Paul Budra and Betty A. Schellenberg define, offer a ‘chronological extension of a precursor narrative’ (1998: 7–8). But Jason Scott (2009: 35) expands upon this definition by again emphasising the role of characters, noting that sequels ‘most commonly continue the story of the protagonist(s)’, utilising ‘a second generation of related characters, and arguably prequels are a reverse chronological extension.’ For example, the Pirates of the Caribbean: Young Jack Sparrow Series was a prequel to the Pirates of the Caribbean films, telling stories about the earlier adventures of Jack Sparrow. Its status as a prequel built the Jack Sparrow character across media via his interactions with secondary characters, appearance and backstory.

In turn, the importance of things like prequels and sequels to how characters may be built across multiple media highlights two bigger – and even more important – principles for how transmedia storytelling works. The first, as Jenkins has shown, is seriality: ‘Transmedia storytelling has taken the notion of breaking up a narrative arc into multiple discrete chunks or instalments within a single medium and instead has spread those disparate ideas or story chunks across multiple media systems’ (2009: online). Serialised forms such as prequels and sequels are adopted in transmedia stories so to build characters across multiple media, expanding on traits such as appearance, backstory and interactions with other characters.

However, it is important to nuance the complexity of how seriality underpins cases of transmedia storytelling. Ben Singer defines seriality as that which ‘extends the experience of the single … text by division, with the selling of the media product in chapters’ (1990: 90). But in some sense, Jenkins’ definition of transmedia storytelling is in direct opposition to Singer’s understanding of seriality: ‘Each [textual] entry needs to be self-contained so that you do not need to have seen the film to enjoy the game, and vice versa’ (2006: 98). Rather than operating as a simple process of selling serialised chapters, then, transmedia storytelling is perhaps better theorised as either a strategic or an emergent/contingent form of expansive intertextuality – using things like characters and their components to link stories together, offering audiences new added insights into characters in ways that constitute a sequel or a prequel, and doing so by quite often switching from one character’s point of view to another as one moves from one medium to another. Or as Jenkins puts it, transmedia storytelling is about subjectivity – that is, ‘exploring the central narrative through new eyes, such as secondary characters or third parties. This diversity of perspective often leads fans to more greatly consider who is speaking and who they are speaking for’ (2009: online).

Consider the various texts emerging from The Matrix film (1999), which Jenkins selects as his transmedia storytelling exemplar. This case consists of three films, a collection of anime shorts called The Animatrix, a comic book series, and a videogame titled Enter the Matrix, all of which were linked via character. In ‘Final Flight of the Osiris,’ one of The Animatrix shorts, for instance, a protagonist called Jue sacrifices herself in order to send a message to the crew of the Nebuchadnezz...